Daily Photos no 33: Stoke-on-Trent (part 1)

Stoke's an endlessly interesting city, as nobody ever says. It was at the forefront of the industrial revolution, thanks the presence of coal and clay (steel production came and went later), while the ceaseless efforts of the ceramic kings like Wedgwood meant it was – for the first and last time - super-connected to the transport infrastructure of the day: canals. Drawing in workers from the surrounding countryside, the city became a place of unremittingly grim labour producing work of astonishing beauty - a largely Methodist population laboured down the mines or under the kilns, breathing in a toxic, choking fog and yet their work graced the tables of the aristocracy and the humble throughout the world. Many of native Arnold Bennett's fascinating novels reflect the proletarian and lower-middle class Potters' struggles, while George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and JB Priestley's English Journey reflect their sympathetic horror at the gap between everyday life and the beauty that emerged from the Six Towns (Bennett forgot Fenton: in return, the city's original  memorial got his dates wrong).

You come across monstrous clay chasms hundreds of feet across and almost as deep, with little rusty tubs creeping on chain railways up one side, and on the other, workmen clinging like samphire-gatherers and cutting into the face of the cliff with their picks. I passed that way in snowy weather and even the snow was black. The best thing one can say for the pottery towns is that they are fairly small and stop abruptly. (The Road To Wigan Pier)

Priestley was even more scathing, and yet he had some empathy for the inhabitants.

This is no region to idle in… not a place designed to comfort and compensate… I do not know what Nature originally made of it, because nearly all signs of her handiwork have been obliterated. But man, who has been very thorough here, has not made of it anything that remotely resembles and inland resort. For a man of the Potteries, it must be either work or misery… as a district to do anything but work in, it has nothing to recommend it.

…it is extremely ugly… I have seen few regions from which Nature has been banished more ruthlessly, and banished only in favour of a sort of troglodyte mankind. Civilised man, except in his capacity as a working potter, has not arrived here yet… Their excellent services of buses… simply take you from one absence of civic dignity to another… these differences are minute when compared with the awful gap between the whole lot of them and any civilised urban region. 

… the general impression is of an exceptionally mean, dingy provinciality, of Victorian industrialism in its dirtiest and most cynical aspect. 

In short, the Potteries are not worthy of the Potter… if you are not working there, if the depression in America or the triumphant competition of the cut-price countries has thrown you out, then God help you, for nothing that you will see or hear or smell in these six towns will raise your spirits. 

And he has the grace to acknowledge that the proles aren't mere passive recipients of patronising concern:

I smoked a pipe with one of their Trade Union officials, a good solid chap ('Oh, we often read you round here', he declared, 'and sometimes we'd like to give you one on the nose'). English Journey. 

Priestley mentions something that all Stoke inhabitants do wherever they are – if you see someone doing this anywhere in the world, be sure to shout ' 'Iya duck' or 'Ey, youth'.

When I dine out, I often turn the plates over and see who has made them.

I took these pictures in 2001 at a canal fair, one of those events that melds nostalgia for a better past with a kind of desperate optimism: that doing anything is better than doing nothing.

Stoke's been abandoned by capitalism and the state in any meaningful way. Coal, steel and mass manufacture pottery have long since gone and the political class of all persuasions has given absolutely no thought to what to do with a population that can't live on selling lattes to each other. There are a few large potteries left but they're on the way out, and only the Wedgwood line that starts at £500 for a saucer is made in the suburbs, but skilled mass employment and the traditions that went with them such as trades unionism, civic pride, socialism (briefly replaced by the BNP and now obsessed with Getting Brexit Done) and hope are things of the past. The respiratory problems have gone too, but poverty and its associated evils have taken their place, alongside low wage service jobs and of course Bet365, which employs thousands, owns Stoke City and paid its owner £323 million this year – in one of the poorest places in Western Europe. I don't think the Methodist city fathers would have been keen on that.

There's a lot to like about Stoke, which is why I'm back there frequently, often with my camera. The people are friendly, the dialect is rich, the oatcakes and pikelets are delicious, there are great musicians (Havergal Brian, Slash, Lemmy and, er, Robbie Williams) and few other places have specialist burglars who know their Clarice Cliff from their Doulton.